Last week, I had written how you could greet your first time commentators with a simple tweak. Here is another tweak with which you can remove your (admin) name from the Recent Comments list. And this time again, no plugins involved 🙂

I guess you are a bit confused on what we are going to do, the following images will explain.

Recent Comments: Before and After

Out-of-the-box: I saw the top commentator widgets on some blogs showing the author himself as the top commentator. There is an option to remove you from the list in the options of the Top Commentator Widget itself. Please write your name in that widget and get yourself removed.

Moving out of Recent Comments

This time again, we exploit the real meaning of open source Content Management System, we edit the WordPress Core. Follow the steps. Written for WordPress 2.7.1, steps must be similar in future versions too.

Find the file widgets.php in wp-includes folder.Download the file and backup a copy, just in case.Open the widgets.php in your favorite code editor. Notepad++ is my favorite.Go to Line 1393 to find

Replace YOUR-NAME-HERE with the display name of the admin. I used Arun Basil Lal.Upload the file to the server, overwriting the old widgets.php file. That’s it.

Known Issues:

When a new WordPress Update comes it might replace the widgets.php file with a new version. Then you will have to repeat this again.

Update: In WordPress 2.8.1 the target file is default-widgets.php in the same folder as widgets.php.

Hello, I am Arun Basil Lal. Thank you for reading!

I am a freelance WordPress developer with over a decade of experience. I am passionate about making things and traveling the world.

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I have a number of websites and blogs, and I use WordPress for one of my blogs. WordPress is quickly becoming my blog management of choice, but it is more complicated to use (if you incorporate your own domain) than it is with other systems – Blogger, for example. That’s why I appreciate technology efficient bloggers like yourself who have the ability to give WordPress users detailed instructions on how to tweak their blogs. When you go into the WordPress core, that can be a scary thing. I hesitate to do it. However, if we have a technology efficient blogger giving us correct instructions on how to tweak – we can feel safer. I don’t know that I will need to put this particular WordPress tip into play. I’m satisfied with things right now. But thanks!

IMHO, WordPress is not complicated. It is powerful and looks good, but its half as complicated as Blogger. Since Blogger is not opensource, the only thing that you get to play with is the code of the template. And there is a drag-and-drop layout editor for that, I guess thats what makes people think Blogger is simple.

Trust me, you will fall addict to wordpress soon!
Thanks for the good words,
Welcome!

Good tip Arun 🙂 I also wanted to implement this for a long time, but my laziness got better of me each time.

But these days i do not want to do this because, my comments as the admin might be what some people expect on a post as a reply to their query or something…not seeing it in the regular stream might piss them off sometimes 🙂

Anand,
You have a point there. Actually I am using that to my advantage. I can stay invisible by removing my comments from the stream (evil me 😉 )
Moreover, if a commentator is expecting a reply, he would have already subscribed to future comments for the post. But as you said, some might assume that the admin never replies to comments at the first sight 🙁